Use privacy tools, go directly to jail. OK, that’s not exactly the bombshell revealed by Thursday’s installment ofleaked NSA documents,but the truth is close enough for serious discomfort. According to the documents, using privacy tools that encrypt your communications and hide your identity is like waving a red flag in front of the surveillance state bull.

Egypt published photos of three men in a boat with their hands tied along with scuba diving tanks. The men were apprehended just offshore where SEA-ME-WE 4 reaches land, according to a Facebook posting purportedly by Egypt’s military.

Egypt’s Facebook account could not be immediately verified with the social networking company, but Telecom Egypt also wrote about the arrests on its Twitter feed. Continue reading →

The report by researchers at the Citizen Lab of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto found the software is “regularly sold to countries where dissenting political activity and speech is criminalized.”

FinSpy, named after a line of code in its software, is a surveillance tool that infects computers to capture screenshots, log keystrokes, record Skype conversations and activate cameras and microphones. Gamma Group, a British company, makes the software and markets it to law enforcement agencies as a lawful way to monitor criminals. Continue reading →

A major anti-pollution protest has forced the Chinese government to take swift action for the second time in as many months, spurred by a rising environment movement that is spreading online.

More than 500 residents living near a plant making solar panels protested for three days last week in the eastern city of Haining, forcing authorities to temporarily shut the factory, which belongs to the US-listed Jinko Solar.

The incident came just over a month after authorities in the northeastern city of Dalian agreed to relocate a chemical plant following similar protests, underscoring official concern over mounting public anger about pollution.

“Citizens, particularly a rising Chinese middle class, have become more aware about how deep the impact of environmental issues is to their health,” said Phelim Kine, senior Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

“They are no longer willing to take it passively.”

Protests against pollution are not new to China, as breakneck economic growth over the past three decades has caused severe degradation of air, land and water.

But the growth of social networking, in particular Twitter-like “weibo” or microblogs, has helped spread the word about environmental issues and mobilize protests against perceived polluters.

Wong Yiu-chung, a politics professor at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, said the shutdown of plants in Haining and Dalian was directly linked to the rising power of the Internet.